I Like To Touch Everything

Sculptor Auke de Vries seldom allows visitors to enter his ‘small’ studio where he works every day. In this intimate space he surrounds himself with dozens of models made of pieces of iron wire, cardboard and tin foil. These strange, fragile creatures inhabit Auke’s world and feed his inspiration. Here he tells us about his youth, his artistic development and his plans for new statues. Auke stays in touch with his sculptures outside the studio as well. He visits them again and again, touches them and photographs them; he checks to see how they are doing. Auke takes us to his big, out-of-the-way statues in Berlin, Magdeburg and Hannover. We are present when his Meuse statue near the Willemsbridge in Rotterdam-popularly known as ‘the clothes-line’-is being cleaned. In the factory, he transforms one of his fragile models into a gigantic figure of glittering steel, a statue for the market square in Ede. We see him in the wasteland of the East German brown coal fields, developing ideas for a new destiny for the region. But he always returns to his attic, back to his companions, the inhabitants of his fantasy world.